Pete Buttigieg and the Summer of Chaos and God

One shared group activity of the past nearly three years has been the attempt to unpack exactly what prompted almost half of the Americans who vote to install a Donald Trump into office. Thomas Edsall has a riveting new piece in the New York Times positing that one important factor was the massive uptick in voters who responded positively to nihilism and chaos. He argues that this segment of the American population is attracted by a generalized "chaos incitement" that has "gained decisive influence through the rise of social media." Edsall draws this theory from an award-winning new paper by two Danish political scientists, Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen, as well as Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple, who show how low-information, highly conspiracy-driven "news" has been weaponized by chaos seekers, "not to advance their own ideology but to undermine political elites, left and right, and to 'mobilize others against politicians in general.'"